arty experimental shit:

woops

is not like other people
i'd call the hungarians avant-gardists myself and the piano woman arty shit as in the thread title
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
i generally take this rhetorical position too, that the experimental is sealed off from the wider movements of culture and is sterile
funny bc that's exactly why the legendary writer in my av said he's not interested in that one obscurantist cambridge poet you're convincing everyone to read
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
You know I think poetry has come to the end of the line in terms of lineage and development and that it also has no real social or cultural function any more to make up for that. That is partly why I have no patience for Prynne composing abstruse word games for tiny print runs or the game that Prynne fans like to play by striving to join semantic dots or squeeze out lexical patterns. It seems so sterile to me.

But the poems that Gaby Roslin posted on her Instagram account or a couple from New York painted on the wall over their bed is more important to me than the constructions of Prynne or the pointless puffery of the Faber roster because however banal you think those poems are you musn't forget that they are a form of modernist free verse and have actually played an active part in imaginations and lives and created a completely new functional and ceremonial space for poetry. I actually find it really impressive and moving.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
suspeneded's point is good. theres nothing experimental about peice that from its onset has a set end- to fit snuggly within the current field of experimental art. Being-made-for and winding-up-in a museum is the distinction that separates the good from the shit usually
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
went to Dia:Chelsea today at lunchtime, which is an art gallery with the kind of cash that you get in america, has two big rooms in Chelsea that they fill with installations. i really like it, always worth wandering over.

one of the rooms was a load of wood that you could sit on. then speakers placed in different parts of the (big) room which had some tuneful droney monklike singing. actually one was in the piece of wood i was sitting on, it vibrated my balls, which i'm not sure was deliberate.

its cool. but with a lot of these kinds of installations i always think: yeah cool but the music could be so much better. and so much louder. the monk singing was alright but nothing i haven't heard before. whereas with that kind of space, and that kind of cash to spend, and that spatial sound set-up, why not push it a bit? get some subs and make it a properly heavy musical experience.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
went to Dia:Chelsea today at lunchtime, which is an art gallery with the kind of cash that you get in america, has two big rooms in Chelsea that they fill with installations. i really like it, always worth wandering over.

one of the rooms was a load of wood that you could sit on. then speakers placed in different parts of the (big) room which had some tuneful droney monklike singing. actually one was in the piece of wood i was sitting on, it vibrated my balls, which i'm not sure was deliberate.

its cool. but with a lot of these kinds of installations i always think: yeah cool but the music could be so much better. and so much louder. the monk singing was alright but nothing i haven't heard before. whereas with that kind of space, and that kind of cash to spend, and that spatial sound set-up, why not push it a bit? get some subs and make it a properly heavy musical experience.
I do think theres something to be said for the delicateness in exhibits like this that you dont get from a heavy musical experience. this is such a conceptual art cliche that its embarrassing to type but you do actually feel more aware of your body in space in these pieces
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
I do think theres something to be said for the delicateness in exhibits like this that you dont get from a heavy musical experience. this is such a conceptual art cliche that its embarrassing to type but you do actually feel more aware of your body in space in these pieces
yeah. it's true. there is often a moment in these things where i open my eyes after having them closed for five minutes and something has definitely changed. there's a load going on with that stuff. i like all that kind of thing basically. but: the music is often a bit boring and not that good. i saw something similar-ish if more budget by i think the sigur ros singer recently. i mean i don't really get much out of that band, so not surprised, but it was the same thing, just thought everything else was great and the tunes were a bit middle of the road
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
yeah. it's true. there is often a moment in these things where i open my eyes after having them closed for five minutes and something has definitely changed. there's a load going on with that stuff. i like all that kind of thing basically. but: the music is often a bit boring and not that good. i saw something similar-ish if more budget by i think the sigur ros singer recently. i mean i don't really get much out of that band, so not surprised, but it was the same thing, just thought everything else was great and the tunes were a bit middle of the road
I had the opposite experience recently when I was watching this unaware parody of standard afro futurist avant garde academic film making except for one bit where a man with a digeridoo would come in while doing some cursory percussion stuff with his free hands and it was so good I slogged through 30 minutes of the shit just for 5-10 sporadic minutes of that guy.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
and Im sure theres some poetic point to be made about the man with the digeridoo harkening back to the tradition of experimental music thats been around as long as there has been instruments embedded within a performance art rendition of a mediocre essay that stands to do nothing but appear to be a new direction
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
Michael Nyman who wrote the book Experimental Music in the 1970s makes a stark distinction between experimental music (almost all descended from Cage, Fluxus) and all that European electronic / musique concrete stuff. As Woops says above, i think he calls that Euro type "avant-garde" and distinguishes it from experimental

Although it may not sound like symphonies and sonatas, the avant-garde composers are much more in the classical tradition - it's Composers doing Compositions, with lofty themes usually, direct references to the Western canon of art, literature, mythology, etc. In the case of someone like Stockhausen he's trying to exert absolute control over all the material constituents of his music, that's partly why he's doing electronics because of the extreme degree of control over all elements it offers. He's totally in the tradition of Wagner and Beethoven.

The post-Cage types are removing control, absenting the authorial ego (well, that is moot, but that's the idea anyway). Setting up processes, writing "scores" that are ridiculously open ended and performers can interpret however. Setting fire to pianos (you can't score that in a real sense, each burned piano will sound different owing to any number of factors - it's not really even something to hear or witness, the idea of it is enough, to have read that someone did .

David Grubbs wrote a book about how this experimental Cagey stuff isn't even meant to be recorded really, the processes are meant to result in different outcomes, each distinct and unrepeatable, of different durations and the point is to be there now in that duration. Fixing it as a definitive recording is totally contra the ethos of the whole things (hence Grubbs title Recordings Ruin the Landscape).

Whereas the Euro-style electronic / musique concrete is totally about recordings, only really makes sense as recordings arguably - the live element just adds volume and perhaps 8 speaker stereo element. There is a definite score - but it's the recording itself really, the blobs of timbre, the panning swoops of sound etc.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
one quirk of yours i've noticed luka (or more likely it's completely normal and i'm weird) is that you don't like direct questioning. challenging questions are met with a terse and elusive "no i don't think so" or "don't see your point sorry" then radio silence.
 

luka

Well-known member
is that right? it probably depends what mood im in, how engaged, how energetic etc
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
Although it may not sound like symphonies and sonatas, the avant-garde composers are much more in the classical tradition - it's Composers doing Compositions, with lofty themes usually, direct references to the Western canon of art, literature, mythology, etc. In the case of someone like Stockhausen he's trying to exert absolute control over all the material constituents of his music, that's partly why he's doing electronics because of the extreme degree of control over all elements it offers. He's totally in the tradition of Wagner and Beethoven.
read an interesting article recently talking about stock's change in spirit (then subsequent change back) on that matter

While in the Fifties he had been one of the most prominent representatives of an ultra-constructionist approach to composition, during the Sixties, Stockhausen's scores become increasingly open and indeterminate, and handcraft slid into the background (or at least its evidence became harder to see on the surface). His music notation became more and more economical, he wrote less and less: in compositions such PROZESSION, KURZWELLEN, SPIRAL, POLE and EXPO the score is constituted mostly by plus, minus and equals signs.
Mary Bauermeister observed: "For my painting, Stockhausen meant structure and form [...] Something like the Sand-Stein-Kugelgruppe would be inconceivable without Stockhausen’s Momente [...] Conversely, what he saw in my work was the possibility of loosening rigid structures. He was really drilled in strict composition. So I brought a certain freedom by saying: if you have made a schematic form, you can unmake it too. [...] With Stockhausen the large form was always built up, constructed, and the details rather more free; with me it was always the other way round. He started from law, I started from anarchy".
The intuitive period did not last very long. Already after his disappointing experience at the Expo 1970 in Osaka, Stockhausen began to doubt the actual validity of intuitive playing. Not by chance the second cycle of intuitive texts was called FÜR KOMMENDE ZEITEN (For Times To Come) – a title which implied that this music was not for the present, but for an utopian future. In 1970, he returned to the traditional musical notation and to a more traditional conception of the work as something fixed in all details with the monumental piece MANTRA. The year 1970 can be considered the practical end of Stockhausen’s period of intuitive music, although it took two more years before it was totally extinct. The definitive end is marked by the first performance of GOLDSTAUB in 1972, by far the most extreme of all the intuitive pieces. Although these two periods overlapped for a short time, a totally new creative phase began at the end of intuitive music and the beginning of Formula Composition. Furthermore, it is very interesting to note that this 'new beginning' occurred exactly at the end of the private relation with Bauermeister. In 1971 they separated definitively.
 

luka

Well-known member
one quirk of yours i've noticed luka (or more likely it's completely normal and i'm weird) is that you don't like direct questioning. challenging questions are met with a terse and elusive "no i don't think so" or "don't see your point sorry" then radio silence.
Thinking about it some more... basically there are heaps of things I can steal from Prynne, innovations I can turn to my own needs and turn to pulp.
 

luka

Well-known member
So I don't want to be and couldn't be a Prynne figure, grey eminence, but I can see in his work lots of stuff that can reinvigorate the language and make it free and surprising again
 
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